Girl, 8, raped to order on the internet

By Sean O'Neill

12:00AM GMT 14 Feb 2001

A GIRL of eight, attending a sleepover party at a schoolfriend's home, was raped to order by her friend's father for the entertainment of a dozen paedophiles logged on to the internet in four different countries.

The abuse of Allison by Ronald Riva took place five years ago in the rural setting of Greenfield, California. Asleep in her friend's bedroom, she was woken by Riva and led into his computer room. There, he used a webcam link to broadcast images of Allison's ill-treatment live to members of an international paedophile club called Orchid.

Members had sent typed messages, which appeared on Riva's computer screen, asking him to perform particular sexual acts on the girl. He willingly complied with their requests. It was Allison's ordeal that led indirectly to the break-up of the world's largest internet pornography ring, and yesterday's jail sentences - widely condemned as inadequate - on seven men at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court, south-west London.

Riva was arrested for his violation of the child. Further evidence of his depravity was uncovered when police seized his computer. On his files, the American officers found the email address of Ian Baldock, a computer consultant, from St Leonards, East Sussex.

Police in Britain were alerted and raided Baldock's flat. Examination of his computer revealed the existence of Wonderland, a sophisticated, hierarchical internet club whose members had created "a vast lending library" of paedophilic material.

Baldock and his six co-accused traded more than 120,000 pornographic images with one another. The children depicted were as young as three months; an overwhelming majority were younger than 10. Wonderland had been created by two American paedophiles and membership of the club was by invitation only.

Prospective members were subjected to an online vetting process about their sexual preferences and were required to submit 10,000 new images as a pre-condition of acceptance. Existing members of the club voted on whether a new candidate should be admitted. Each time they entered the Wonderland channel, users went through seven separate security checks and had to pass two electronic gatekeepers known as Alice and Sandra.

Members, who used nicknames such as Caesar, Satan and Hopeful, were advised on how to encrypt their stores of images to hide them from police and other authorities. They never emailed pictures but logged on remotely to each other's terminals to "leech" large numbers of pictures.

The club members with the highest status were those who abused children themselves and made images of that abuse available to others. The most senior British member of Wonderland was Gary Salt, a former RAF engineer from Stockport. He made images of himself abusing three children - including one selection of pictures called the Hell Series - and distributed them in the club.

Some British members of Wonderland travelled to his home to exchange CDs of pictures and to meet the children he had assaulted. Salt was jailed for 12 years for child sex offences in 1999. David Hines, 30, Wonderland's senior channel operator in Europe and a friend of Salt, said: "Gary was doing what we all believed in. He wasn't just talking about it he was doing it." Hines, typically among paedophiles, had been abused as a child. "We didn't see it as abuse," he said. "These were children who were involved in relationships."

In all, more than 100 Wonderland members were arrested in Britain, America, Europe and Australia in a carefully synchronised swoop on Sept 2 1998. In Germany a senior civil servant was detained. In America, a university professor was among those held. Officers seized tons of computer equipment from which experts extracted 750,000 paedophilic images and 1,800 video clips. In Britain a seven-ton lorry was needed to transport the computer equipment taken from 15 addresses.

The operation is not yet over. A database of the 1,263 children featured in Wonderland images has been circulated by Interpol. Only 17 of those children have been positively identified, six of them in Britain. One child on the database is Rui Pedro Mendonca, 11, a Portuguese boy who was abducted three years ago on his way home from school and has not been seen since. It is feared that his abductors killed him after recording his abuse for the gratification of Wonderland members.

Det Supt Peter Spindler of the National Crime Squad said: "We have taken out the largest organised paedophile group on the network. They considered themselves the creme de la creme of paedophiles."

When the Wonderland members were sentenced at Kingston yesterday, they were told by Judge Kenneth Macrae they had used their computer know-how "to commit crimes decent people find unimaginable". His sentencing powers were significantly less than those of the American judge who dealt with Ronald Riva, the American whose abuse of eight-year-old Allison triggered the chain of events that brought about their downfall. He jailed Riva for 100 years.